interviews
A Bifurcated Approach
by Paul Frymer
February 24, 2021
This interview with Paul Frymer, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Paul | The Wagner Act was built on the idea of making the workplace accountable to the workers, of getting better wages, and improving working conditions. It is a relic of a time when the government was involved in regulatory action. We just don't do that much anymore at least in the realm of labor politics.
One thing I write about in my book, Black and Blue, is that at the time of the New Deal, civil rights were really not a priority for most U.S. politicians. Though the vast majority of African-Americans had no voting rights and no protection against economic discrimination, these big pieces of legislation like the Wagner Act did not try to change that structure.
The New Deal was built around the idea of a white working class, and the Wagner Act is part of that.
What would it have looked like if it included civil rights?
Most straightforwardly, the NAACP wanted a provision in the Wagner Act that said that employers can’t discriminate on a basis of race. That was not in there.
The Democratic Party, which was reliant on Southern Democrats at the time, did not want that and it was not put in the bill. As such, the legislation allowed companies and unions to discriminate on the basis of race. There is a case in the 1950s that I mention in my book where an employer was accused of firing workers because they were union members. You can't do that according to the Wagner Act. So, he said he didn't fire them because they were union members, he fired them because they were black. That was fine under the law.
Workers in Hole, photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth56863/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hardin-Simmons University Library.
You write about how labor movements and civil rights movements often act independently of each other, rather than in conjunction. Why is there bifurcation?
It is a great and complicated question. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great civil rights intellectual and activist in the early 20th century, famously wrote about just how easy it is for employers to divide workers on the basis of racism.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, employers used to bring in African-Americans from the South or Chinese workers to break strikes and to create racial conflict. Though we are a long way from those kinds of extreme examples, today, we can still see the ways in which race and class have difficulty coalescing. We have lots of great examples of when they do when multi-racial or multi-ethnic coalitions form around class lines, but it’s very hard to do.
Specifically, in terms of the Wagner Act, the 1930s was the time of the labor movement and the labor movement, itself, was largely white. Later, in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement gets underway. The white labor movement publicly supports civil rights, but not always privately. Just as we have seen in the Trump era, there were conflicts among white workers who did not want greater diversity. Unions have continued to struggle with this.
Democrats have stepped back from workers. Trump towards them. Do you think his labor support is essentially just about race?
No, it was not just race. He gave them a sympathetic story to buy into. He said that he was going to give them their jobs back. He said that the United States and the Democratic and Republican Party had forgotten about the working class and that they don't care about the working class. They shipped your jobs out to other countries, he said. The sympathetic story is not that far off from the same one Bernie Sanders told. Jesse Jackson ran on that message in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a very powerful message that resonates.
The problem is, a lot of people out there, media and politicians, look for a scapegoat, and race is an easy scapegoat. Economic messages resonate a lot more when there are people who “don't look like us” that are perceived as threatening the white working class. So we point to things like building a wall.
[Workers on Platform], photograph, [1965-05-13..1965-05-24]; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1011027/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
There's long been a debate within the Democratic Party about class and race, and how to emphasize both. One part of the party says it’s all about class and that race is an artificial construction that employers used to keep themselves in power, so we should emphasize economic distribution and racial inequality will be reduced in the process. That goes so far, but it doesn't go all the way. Race may be an artificial construct, in that we no longer attribute race with individual differences, but it still has taken an incredibly powerful meaning in our society as a result of longstanding prejudice and discrimination. Our solutions can’t just be about universal policies. We need to recognize that there is racism, discrimination, and prejudice in America and that it needs to be addressed on its own. It too cannot be dealt with in isolation from issues of class, but it needs its own stress and dedication. It's really complicated to have those conversations, obviously with Trump voters, but with progressives, suburbanites, and just about everyone else as well.
Backing up a little bit — in the 1930s, there were very few black members in unions. Over time it really moves up, but union participation more broadly declines. Why is that?
You are right. During the time in which African-Americans and Latinos have joined the labor movement, labor movement numbers declined dramatically.
Part of the reason for that is globalization. Part of the reason is that employers can reclassify workers so that they cannot be unionized--see the battles over Uber and Lyft and the gig economy more generally. And a big part of the reason is that employers are incredibly aggressive. Employers are very aggressively breaking the law and they can get away with it. What employers will do immediately is fire union organizers. That is against the law, but they know that they will just be slapped on the wrist, if anything. There is a lot of intimidation. Employers have all of these opportunities to make appeals to workers, to talk to them as a ‘captured audience’. The union does not have the right to access these workers, the way employers do.
You can see these aggressive tactics with the current Amazon fight. Amazon is about to have a union election in Alabama.
The union is fighting for the ability to vote by mail in light of COVID, and Amazon, just as the Republican party does, is fighting to make voting more difficult.
They don't want people to vote in the privacy of their homes because they know they will quite likely vote yes to the union.
What do you wish the media would note in their coverage of something union organizing?
The media has often made it seem like the union is the bully and the employer is the individual. They make it seem like people have the right to make as much money as they want, and whether individuals want to work for a certain company or not, is their individual problem. This whole idea of collective action is hard for a lot of Americans to understand.
It is also important to note that in a place like Alabama, where racism is deeply embedded in the history, culture, and still resonates in current politics, the employers use hiring practices to capitalize on this. They will bring in more immigrants to work. This racializes the workforce and the employers know what they are doing. In sweatshops and meatpacking plants, for example, they hire workers that speak all different languages so that they have difficulty communicating with each other.
So union organizing work is very, very hard and incredibly stressful. Especially going against Amazon, a massive corporation that is going to throw everything at you. Any worker who has been part of a union drive knows it is an incredibly stressful and often quite scary period of time. Employers will try to capitalize on this further by saying, vote against the union, and all this stress will go away.
Do you think support from local and national politicians is helpful or maybe even a requirement for successful labor union activism?
Totally. At the local level, we do have politicians to do that, and that is helpful. And Bernie will show up. And AOC will show up.
But what we need is the Democratic Party as a whole to stand by unions.
You see this dynamic right now going on with teachers and the nurse's unions and the question about whether the Biden administration will negotiate with teachers over COVID issues at school. The Democratic Party, generally, supports unions, but they frequently offer very little direct support to union campaigns. I mean the Democratic Party taking on Amazon is a big, big pill. Jeff Bezos gives a ton of money to the Democratic Party. He owns the Washington Post. Look at the conflict a few years ago when he pulled a potential Amazon plant from New York City in response to AOC’s opposition. It is not easy, and it often pits Democrats against Democrats.
Why do you think, politically, workers are sidelined for the swing voter? What do you think this obsession with the swing voter is, rather than the working class?
2020 is a good example of that. The African-American vote was the backbone of the Democratic victory. The African-American was critical to winning Georgia. The vote probably won Michigan, and on and on. President Trump obviously realized that because he was trying to make African American voting in Philadelphia and Detroit and in Atlanta much more difficult, or even throw large numbers of votes out.
But the strategists of the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly white.
Most of them are ambivalent on issues of race themselves. They look at the broader map and they say, "Well, who are voters that we need to win?" And frequently, they draw a big circle around white suburbanites. Election after election, the conventional wisdom is white suburbanites. We see that after what happened 2016. The focus immediately turns to those disgruntled white Trump voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio.
And there is some truth to that. The white suburban vote in Georgia was also critical. Not independently of the African-American vote, but the African-American vote is not a majority vote in this country or in any state. You do need a significant proportion of white voters. But the Democratic Party, I think, has overplayed that idea in the sense that they think that in order to win the white vote, you need to then downplay civil rights, and downplay things like Black Lives Matter. There's evidence that goes in both directions. A lot of political scientists are currently studying how much the Black Lives Matter protests helped or hurt the Democratic Party. This is an incredibly fraught issue.
[Two Construction Workers], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc499160/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
And when you talk about Black Lives Matter you do risk opposition from the white suburbs and other white workers. And that requires the Democratic Party, and our government more broadly, to have bigger conversations. They don't want to have those conversations, obviously. They don't want to explain to people why Black Lives Matter is singularly important for historical and systemic reasons, and how in certain ways, it is also for all of us. Those are hard conversations, and the Democratic party doesn't want to have them.
And you know, you see why any time anyone, whether it’s Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or AOC or Bernie Sanders, says anything of nuance or subtlety, it gets shredded, and frequently, they back away.
This is cynical, but the country is becoming less and less white, at some point the white suburbanite won’t be the majority.
If you look at California in the 1990s, the Republican Party made, in a way, the same big bet on white voters that Trump did. And over time, they have gotten crushed. California is a liberal Democratic state because of demographics and so forth. So, there is hope among progressives that California is a sign of the future of the United States and that the Republicans are going to be crushed in the coming years.
Some Republicans think that too because they are focusing on trying to stop people from voting. They're trying to stop immigrants from entering the United States they fear will become Democrats. They're trying to stop Washington DC from becoming a state.
The one footnote to this is that I find the demographic argument a little bit problematic in that populations are not static. Populations are changing over time. Some populations ‘become white’ over time. We've seen hints of this within the numbers of some Latino populations.
We've already seen it with Cubans, a large number who have been conservatives and Republicans from the first migrations in the 1960s. Puerto Ricans are largely Democrats but there are some openings there, with a strong Republican presence in Puerto Rico itself. You see movement with the third, fourth, fifth-generation Mexican populations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico as well.
The other thing that you touched on is young people.
What happens with young people as they age? Is the take away from what is currently being said, "I believe black lives matter and I think we need a new era." Or is the takeaway, "I believe black lives matter until it comes to my town and my school and my police department and impacts my housing prices."
This is the moment for the progressive white middle-class to decide how much it embraces racial progress and actively promotes it going forward.
Yeah. How serious are you, I guess.
Oh, I don’t doubt people’s seriousness and sincerity of beliefs. But it is once these beliefs are confronted with different dynamics that you have to really struggle with and be willing to face and accept.
You see this in gentrifying neighborhoods, from Brooklyn to the Mission of San Francisco to Silverlake in LA. These are pockets of progressive white populations. How much are they willing to embrace diversity over the long term, and recognize what it actually means?
The gentrifiers are probably the most progressive politically. Housing in LA is expensive, but…
That is why I think the government is so important. Because you hear these stories you can sympathize or you can find a way to understand it. And I don’t think it's just rationalizing. Every individual story is importantly different. But, that's where the government, I think, needs to step in and say, “We are going to set these rules and everybody has to follow these rules.”
That takes the pressure off of the individuals, and puts the onus on the government to create these spaces that are diverse. That is what we should do as opposed to putting all the energy on the single worker who has to go on strike for a year.
We should put the onus on broader government structures and law so that we actually make it easier for everybody to have it.
interviews
Trickle Down Liberalism
by Chris Lodgson
February 11, 2021
This interview with Chris Lodgson, organizer in Sacramento, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Chris | My name, Chris Lodgson. I'm originally from New York City. I was born and raised in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I spent 20 plus years in New York City and then I moved to Sacramento, about six years ago. I've been organizing for what feels like my whole life. Some of us choose to get into this work, and I love and respect those who do, and some of us don't really have a choice based on how we were brought up.
frank | A lot of your organizing centers around reparations.
I had the privilege and pleasure to be a part of the groups that helped get our state's first reparations task force passed through AB-3121. I've been very fortunate to work with folks like Dr. Sandy Darity, probably the foremost reparations scholar. He has helped me understand how reparations is really the only pure solution to the plight of African Americans. I am also campaign lead for Fix HR40, the only organized campaign to help improve the only reparations legislation in Congress. HR40 has been sitting in Congress in some way, or some facet for 30 years.
Reparations is critical to us. The lack of reparations is why the Black and white wealth gap has continued for many many years. Reparations is the only way to fix that. There are a bunch of universal programs that we think would be awesome. Raising the minimum wage, great. Canceling student loan debt, great. However, ultimately, none of that is going to end the racial wealth gap.
With that in mind, what does an effective anti-poverty movement look like to you?
First of all, those interested in the anti-poverty movements have to accept reparations as a part of an efficient, effective anti-poverty program. This is not something that's outside of or the extreme of an anti-poverty movement.
If you look back to Johnson in the 1960s, in the process of debuting some of his anti-poverty policies, he reintroduced affirmative action specifically for Black Americans who descend from U.S. slavery, as a part of an effective anti-poverty framework.
In his speech at Howard, he talks about how in the post-war period, in the 60s, the conditions of almost every group improved, except for Black folks who descended from slavery. Why? He said that this has to be because of the legacy of slavery. He said that we need to take some affirmative action. That, of course, is a fraction of what we needed to do. We needed a reparations program. We needed it then and we need it now. But, we can look to Johnson talking about specifically targeting Black Americans who descend from US slavery as part of the history of anti-poverty movements.
So, to answer your question, an effective anti-poverty movement today is one that embraces reparations. It is one that is not scared by policy solutions that are race-specific or lineage-specific or ethnicity-specific.
We have to do this together, but that doesn't mean that our specific interests and our specific needs go unmet.
What push back do you get on race-specific or lineage-specific policies?
We hear that reparations is reverse racism. We hear that you can't fight racism with racism. We hear the old tropes about how this is America, you can and should lift yourself up by your bootstraps. If you haven't succeeded, you don't work hard enough or you're not educated enough. You are telling me that an entire community is disadvantaged because of something that each and every single person was doing? No.
It is this idea that if we do something for everybody, then by osmosis or by accident, you all are going to do better too. But there is no evidence for that. In fact, the evidence says that the opposite. You can actually hurt Black people by doing things like canceling all student debt. Trust me, I know there's a lot of people who want that, but less than 20% of Black Americans who descend from slavery go to college and have college debt. In effect, you end up widening the wealth gap. I want to see that these things happen, but they have to happen at the same time as a reparations program or after a reparations program.
Why do you think Democrats, the party that has embraced “anti-racism”, have failed to implement targeted economic proposals to their platform?
I think that the Democratic party is influenced and managed and run by people who subscribe to a lot of the same arguments the Republicans do. They believe in the “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” argument and the “rising tide lifts all boats” argument. These are common ideals within the Democratic party, even if you look to the progressive left.
I mean, universal policies were Bernie's whole thing. I think that Bernie would have had a better chance, and the progressive wing would have had a better chance, if he could say the words, "Black people." Not “Black and brown people.” Not “people of color.” And I know that for a fact because I was organizing during the campaign. Most Black folks, my age, were not comfortable with Joe Biden. A lot of us were children in the 90s and saw what that crime bill did to us then, and what it is still doing to us now. A lot of us had to go live with our grandmothers and aunts because somebody was in jail or somebody's mom was on crack or because the neighborhood was too dangerous. That is scarring.
If the progressive wing of the Democratic party, if Bernie, could address Black folks specifically and target Black folks through policies, I think they would be more successful.
I can't speak for the rest of the party as to why they don't address those policies, but I would guess that it is because it is not always in their political benefit to target Black folks. Particularly in a political system rigged by redistricting, gerrymandering, and the influence of money in politics, it is not in the interest of the Democrats to fight for Black people.
What is echoed through our interviews this month is this sense that Democrats don’t speak to the deep needs of the working class – whether that's Black working class or working class more broadly – because they don't see them as essential constituencies to win. Do you think that's true?
I think it's true, but I think there's something else underneath that. When it comes to Black folks, specifically Black folks that have descended from U.S. slavery, our history of who we are in this country makes us a unique group. It makes it more difficult for Democrats to decide to do something specifically on our behalf.
Look at last summer. For a couple of months, it looked like we were about to take some important steps within the Democratic party. I was out there last summer. I took the tear gas and the flash grenades. I got sick with COVID. For a minute it felt like we may actually do something, but what actually did we do? I would argue that if the campaign centered more around Black folks who descened from U.S. slavery, there would have had more success legislatively.
What other factors do you think were important to the outcomes, or lack of outcomes from summer 2020? Do you think an economic message was put to the forefront?
Before I even go into it, I do want to give a shout out to the organizers and activists on the ground who took the tragedies that we saw, and got busy locally, statewide, and nationally.
But, I am disappointed that not more came from the energy we saw. I think part of that lies with the way that the media covered it. I think the last few months showed us that whatever you want to hear, you can find media that feeds you that opinion. That is why so many people think Donald Trump actually won the election and ran into the Capitol ready to kill people. I definitely think the organization of our media, social media, and social media influencers diluted some of the moment.
There is also the criticism that the only policy action that you can take from the protests is to defund the police. And this was coming from all sides. When I learned about defunding the police, I learned about it through a framework called invest-divest, back in 2016, led by Movement for Black Lives. And there was some success there, I actually created a tracker to track all George Floyd related legislation that divested in "public safety" and invested into community programs.
But, in the circles that I ran in, there was doubt about whether defunding the police was the solution. So there was some disorganization, some confusion, and some lack of faith in that big, single policy outcome. In my circles, in particular, we were saying we need reparations and we need a comprehensive reparations program, and we need it now. That is the solution. And it's better than saying defund the police and better than saying invest divest even, even though most of us support those movements as well.
It’s important for white liberals to realize their efforts to help may have paternalistic tendencies. Whether that's what you called “trickle-down liberalism”, or not being willing to have a nuanced discussion about the policies coming out of BLM, I don’t know.
Even with the most well-intentioned, left-leaning white person, we have to acknowledge that this goes back a long time. Me and you go back a long time. We have been in this for over 400 years. We are going to have to figure this thing out. We are going to have to figure out how to live together.
A lot of people in my community see the left and right as two sides of the same coin. As Malcolm X described it, the wolf and the fox. He said the left is the fox and the right is the wolf. He said that he had more respect for the wolf because the wolf will show you his teeth, whereas the fox will pretend to be your friend before he eats you.
Black folks weren't surprised about what we saw at the Capitol. We’re used to white people getting violent. Very used to that. I don't think it’s your average white person who is looking for AOC in the bathroom or for Nancy Pelosi, but that is a part of the white community.
So we're going to have to figure this out. I don't know what it is to be white, but I don't necessarily envy the position that a lot of white folks, who are well-meaning and who want to do good, are in.
Like you said, some choose to get in this fight, some are born into it. How do organizers think about changing participation and organizing around a working-class, or a Black working-class identity?
That's right. The folks who are the most impacted tend to participate the least in politics. But, I want to expand what we think about when we think of participation. I'm not just talking about voting, I'm talking about getting involved, organizing locally, standing up for yourself, and standing up for your people.
In New York, we have what we used to call a johnny pump. One of those open fire pumps with kids playing in the water. We did that a lot in the summertime. When the police show up, tell you to turn the water off, call y'all monkeys and animals, and say "I'm only here to lock you up, to me, politics looks like standing up for yourself and your community. Politics looks like saying, “No, I'm not going to let you talk to us like that. I'm not gonna let you treat us like that”.
I am talking from personal experience, this is something that really happened to me. That is politics. That is participation.
This, again, is my personal experience. This is real life. It's not back in the 70s, this is in the early 2000s. That's political.
And this is coming from New Yorkers. New York is run by Democrats. California is run by Democrats. The situations in these places are horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.
And that is the point. That keeps us in the bottom caste. We are not supposed to do any better. Society was designed to do that and now, it is self-reinforcing. The system works without much effort. It doesn't take a maniacal conspiracy and people plotting behind closed doors to hurt us, that was already done. Now it just works. It's very efficient, it's very effective, and that's what we're up against.
The problem is, to make a real change, there has to be a high level of coordinated politics. There needs to be strategic voting. There needs to be community organizing on a wider scale. From one block to the next, we have to see each other as the same community. And I think we can be unified around the fact that we descend from U.S. slavery.
And I feel like I have to say this: if we don't achieve a reparations program in the next decade, there are going to be a lot fewer people like me in this country. It's not like we have to exist as a people. Your existence as a people is a function of whether or not you can survive. When's the last time you saw an aboriginal Australian? When's the last time you saw an aboriginal Canadian? Keep it real, when is the last time you saw a Native American?
I'm a firm believer that if we don't achieve a reparations program soon, we may pass a point of no return. As a people, we were already on the road to zero wealth in 2018. That's before COVID did its worst. Here in the city of Sacramento, one-third of all Black folks have zero wealth. If you add up the wealth of the bottom half of Black America, the total is less than $1.
I don't mean to sound like an alarmist, but I kind of have to say that we're on fire. It's not just a house that's on fire, the people inside it are too. Reparations is the solution. It's just one of many, but without it, nothing else works.